By Any Other Name
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Vanessa Kimball has always had a weakness for lost causes. The trick is not to let it get you down. Contains mild spoilers for episode six of season twelve.


When Vanessa Kimball was twelve years old, her friends dragged her into their obsession with the meanings of names.

It wasn't an unusual topic of conversation for a gaggle of Chorus colony kids, curious and a little desperate to draw on some claim of past history, to transport themselves back to a little patch of ground on a planet none of them would ever visit and say, "Hey, part of me started here." The ego-stroke when you figured out your name had some great destiny attached to it wasn't half-bad, either. Alex and Chionesu were especially smug and remembered to be protective of their less etymologically-endowed classmates for about five days until the next big obsession came around.

_Vanessa_, she discovered, was a name invented by some ancient Earth guy for a poem about what turned out to be a doomed love affair. It was a fiction within a fiction, a mangled version of the lady's real name in a piece of literature that very nearly never saw the light of day.

When she uncovered that factoid, her friends squinted at her and shrugged with a sort of awkward distaste, scrambling to change the subject to a new game, to something she could be included in. They were always painfully considerate, eager to please, because she smiled big and because she told funny stories and because her dad had died in front of her last year and everybody knew it.

But Vanessa took her mangled secondhand name and wrapped herself around it at night, murmuring it into her cupped hands as she huddled under her blanket and tried not to hear her big sister crying. The name wasn't much, but it was hers.

She'd always had a weakness for lost causes.

* * *

Chorus was a mess.

It was one of those sentences adults flung around with uncaring ease the same way they talked about the weather and the radioactive swamps. "Oh, you know, Brian down the road's got a new crop of goldflowers in this year and they look just _lovely_. But oh, Chorus is just such a _mess_ these days."

Vanessa hesitantly echoed the sentiment a few times as a teenager, trying it on for size, and her ears burned every time. Chorus was home. Chorus was the weird tree that kept almost falling over in the backyard and Chorus was the crumbling public transit system and Chorus was the cute girl down the street, Ceren (meaning: "young gazelle", from the Turkish), who met her sometimes in the woods and kissed her like she was an ice cream cone about to melt. It didn't seem right to make fun of home.

But her political science classes grew more and more intense, layers of quiet, childish fictions stripping away the more she read. Her teachers' biases became more apparent, and the fact that they were all biased toward federalism struck her all at once when she was flopped on the floor of her room next to her sister, passing a joint back and forth. Well. Vanessa mostly just pretended to smoke. She sort of thought she might become a politician someday, and everyone knew politicians were supposed to have saintly childhoods.

"Yeah," Maria (a name tracing through Latin, Greek, Hebrew origins, strong religious significance) said, taking a long drag and blowing out the smoke. Vanessa held her breath. "Good job, kiddo. You've cracked the code."

"No, but," Vanessa said, and stopped, choosing her words more carefully. "I just don't know why we're not seeing the sides of the dissidents, y'know? They've probably got some valid concerns."

Maria sighed exaggeratedly. "Ugh, you're so philosophical when you're pretending to be stoned."

"I'm not pretending—"

"You've got, like, an aura of righteousness that fends off even contact highs, kid." Maria grinned. "It's okay. Didn't mean to pressure you. I know you just want to hang out."

Vanessa shrugged, feeling heat rising in her face.

"Look," Maria said, more seriously, dragging herself up to a sitting position. Vanessa mirrored the motion. "You've got this thing about underdogs. It's dangerous. Remember what happened with the kitten?"

Vanessa cringed. When she was fourteen—couple years ago already—their neighbors had presented them with their choice of a litter of kittens. Mom had been thrilled; she was in one of her upswings, then, reassigned to a new position in the military police that meant longer hours and a lot less time alone to think. A couple of new pets would keep the girls company, she gushed, and beckoned them forward to make their choice. Maria had instantly latched onto the biggest, most playful of the litter, and it had grown up into a snarly little beast that occasionally allowed a tummy rub for the cost of most of the skin on your forearms.

Vanessa, against her mother's protestations, had stubbornly insisted on the runt of the litter. It had died two days later.

"Life's not some inspiring story, kid," Maria said now, with all the world-weariness of an ancient nineteen-year-old. "Bad shit happens whether you want it to or not. You just gotta keep on keeping on. Usually that means picking the fast horse whenever you get the chance."

Vanessa believed few things as fervently as she believed that cynicism was boring as fuck. "Someone's gotta pick the slow ones," Vanessa said. Her big smile felt false, even to her.

"No," Maria said. There was pity in her voice. "No, kid, they really don't."

* * *

Chorus was a mess, and people were dying.

The last half of the sentence changed it from dinner-room politics to a whispered tragedy, to unspoken rage, to half-articulated frustrations and fears and the evening news blacked out more and more often. _People are dying_.

Vanessa was well into her final year as a journalist at the local college when the civil war broke out, and she fudged a few of the graduation requirements with the help of Maria's burgeoning skills at fraud. Turned out her sister's talents, harnessed from a few half-assed college courses in communications, weren't all that different from the ones needed to hack the backwater systems Chorus used. Turned out fake college transcripts weren't all that different from fake IDs.

Their mom was eventually shipped out to the front lines, where MPs were in short supply and high demand, especially given the rising number of desertions to the dissenters. The goodbye wasn't too tearful; they'd grown apart as adults tend to do, and Chorus was a mess, and anyway, people were dying. It could have been worse.

Vanessa talked her way into a job as a junior journalist, trailing a mentor from college to a position reporting on the front lines from the self-styled New Republic's point of view. Mostly fluff pieces—as fluffy as you could get in a war—with a hint of propaganda and maybe a smidgen of secret rebellion so deeply buried that nobody who cared would ever catch it.

Her mentor died three days into the jungle, a Fed's bullet taking her in the throat during a firefight. Vanessa was perfectly positioned to watch it happen. The symmetry didn't escape her.

She sent in her report to her editor that night, before deadline. As she waited for confirmation, she replayed the recording: she'd been sweaty, coils of wiry hair sticking to her forehead. There'd been tears in her eyes, but her voice had been strong, and she'd been smiling big, a terrified expression, as she described the scene. The next day, she discovered that the Feds had spun the footage to make it look like the lawless dissidents had killed this innocent young reporter's best friend in the world. They wanted to give her a medal when she got home.

The leader of the New Republic, an older woman with white teeth and white skin and buzzed white hair, clapped her on the shoulder and said, "Maybe this is your fight now too, hey?"

* * *

The New Republic's leader, Tatiana (named for a martyr), died a week later, shot down at the front lines.

"Old biddy probably did it on purpose," Felix said. He was sitting on a stone, polishing a knife that looked perfectly well polished already. He was in full armor, not even looking Vanessa's way. He was playing the cool, unapproachable mercenary. He was also, unquestionably, a jerk.

When his statement failed to get a rise out of her, he glanced over, briefly, then went back to polishing his knife. "I mean, she fuckin' asked me to redistribute her weapons to the others. Left her with a rifle that jammed. She knew it jammed."

Vanessa shrugged; she'd suspected as much. She also suspected Felix didn't realize how his voice had cracked. He wasn't exactly one for self-awareness, their hired gun. "She did it for us."

"Riiight," Felix said, drawing the word out at the same time as he drew a particularly long stroke down to the hilt of his knife. He paused, staring at it. "Uh. Does this look kind of weird? Polishing this in my lap?"

"Little bit, yeah."

"Uh," he said again. "Let's pretend that didn't happen." He cleared his throat, sheathing his knife and shifting awkwardly on his perch. "I mean, dying for the cause. That's real great. I'm happy for her. But she was one of the only trained guns you had." It was always 'you' with Felix, never 'we'. Vanessa was pretty sure he practiced his 'you's in the mirror every night before bed.

Vanessa shrugged. "She was a romantic. Figured it was a way to keep us together, keep us motivated."

Felix looked up at the sky for a second, muttering something under his breath that sounded to Vanessa's unpracticed ear like Korean. "Fucking old biddy. You guys are toast without her."

"Sure," Vanessa said. "That why you're sticking around?"

He glanced back at her. "Who says I'm sticking around?"

She shrugged. "We're still paying you, and you really like money. Also, y'know. Since you spent so much time polishing your knife, I figured you might be planning on putting it to use."

"Hah," he said, and then, "How's training going? You gonna be a soldier after all?"

"I'm gonna be a lot of things," she said. "But first, yeah. Soldier it is."

He looked her up and down, and she smiled big. "Fuck," he said. "You're gonna be running this place, aren't you?"

"Someone's gotta bet on the slow horse, Felix," Vanessa said, and left him to polish his knives and try to puzzle that one out.

* * *

Their next leader died at the would-be peace talks. Felix took a bullet to the shoulder in the firefight, but smirked through the pain, his cynicism paying dividends at last. Vanessa shrugged and ran the obstacle course for the fifteenth time that day, trying not to think about poor Commander Gray (obvious meaning, a bland name for a bland man), shot mid-handshake with the Feds' leader.

The Feds brought in outside help. The New Republic tried the same, and thus fell Leader #3, Reynold, whose name meant 'king'.

When Vanessa Kimball became the leader of the New Republic, the New Republic consisted of a shockingly small band of shockingly young, shockingly untrained soldiers.

"Well," Felix said, "you're looking pretty fucked." But he showed up mid-battle with an improbably huge array of fresh weapons, relieved from their Fed owners by, he assured her, entirely illegal means. The tide turned.

* * *

The tide turned back.

Vanessa was expecting it because, hey. She may have been an optimist, but she was a _realistic_ optimist. You bet on the slow horse enough times, you pick the runt of the litter enough times, you get used to constant disappointment. The trick was just to keep it from getting you down. The trick was the big smile at the end.

The Reds and Blues were supposed to be the New Republic's big chance. They were supposed to have _two Freelancers_ with them, along with an A.I. stolen from the Project. They were supposed to be heroes.

Instead, Felix trudged back to camp with Private Tucker's limp body slung over his shoulder, Privates Grif and Simmons and Caboose trailing nervously in his wake. "Locus," he said, by way of explanation, and dropped Tucker on a bed before stalking off.

"Look," Grif said. His voice was verging on a panicked falsetto. "Look, I don't know what's happening here, but we gotta go back."

"Sarge was still back there," Simmons said, in a soft, stunned voice. "Nobody helped me carry him."

"Is he okay?" Caboose asked, hunched next to Tucker's still form on the bed. There was a crack in Tucker's visor, and Vanessa was already going through a mental tally of their resources, trying to figure out if they could spare a repair job on the helmet. Probably.

"The doc's gonna take a look," she told Caboose, snapping out of her stunned paralysis. She smiled big. "C'mon. We've gotta get you guys debriefed."

For no apparent reason, their eyes all snapped to Tucker's unconscious form. Caboose muttered something that ended in "bow-wow."

* * *

It took her five minutes of training to realize that these guys were probably more lucky than good. It took her ten minutes of trying to put out various fires to realize that these guys were _definitely_ more lucky than good.

"They're idiots," Felix said, standing beside her as the Reds and Blues dragged their squads into something resembling formation.

"They're good for morale," she corrected him. "That's harder to come by. Good soldiering is something that can be taught."

"Huh," he said, and shot her one of his nervous little sidelong glances. "Guess so."

"I just hope it can be taught quickly," she said. The simulation started. The Reds and Blues stumbled into battle to the tune of Tucker's irritated wails of, "Guys, just fucking _listen_ to me!"

* * *

When somebody stepped into her office at the end of shift, she was expecting Felix. He'd been whining more than usual lately about little things, which was his way of expressing worry. Or, y'know, generalized douchebaggery. She knew he'd been expecting a dressing-down after Cunningham (from a Celtic name, unknown meaning) and Rogers (meaning: fame and spear, well, so much for that). She also knew the lack of dressing-down would be far more effective.

"Hey," said the voice at the door. It wasn't Felix.

Few things startled her these days, but Dexter Grif actually getting off his ass and coming to see her in full armor definitely made the list. "Uh," she said, "Captain Grif. Good to see you. What's going on?"

Grif was standing in the doorway, one hand clenched into a fist against the doorframe. She watched as he clenched and unclenched it. "Are you lying?"

She blinked. "What?"

"I mean, are you fucking lying to us?" His voice was steady, but his hand clenched again, spasmodically. "They're dead, right? That Locus fucker wouldn't keep them alive. He was... he was fucked up. He shot Wash. Guy's a fucking Freelancer, and this asshole shoots him and he just goes down and doesn't get up again. Just like that. He shot _Sarge_."

"I'm not lying to you," Vanessa said.

"Bullshit. I know Tucker buys it, he just... he cares too much. Simmons and Caboose would probably still believe they're alive even if we stumbled across their bloody fucking mangled corpses. But me, I don't give a shit. Tell me."

Vanessa sighed, dragged off her helmet, and leaned back in her chair. "What do you want, Captain? You've had access to all the same intel we have. I wouldn't lie to you."

"You need us," Grif said. His voice was rising, but not in an aggressive way. This was anger turned inward, desperation. "You told us yourself, you need our help. You'd lie to keep us around. Just tell me you're fucking lying."

Vanessa rested her helmet on the desk, turning its visor to face the wall. "I think maybe you care more than you think, Captain. We'll find them."

Grif's hand clenched, once, and then he muttered, "Fuck," and stormed out.

Vanessa rubbed her eyes, leaning back in her chair and staring up at the ceiling. Thinking of Chorus, Chorus-the-mess. Thinking of Rogers and Cunningham. Thinking of blind faith and blinder distrust. Thinking of her patchwork name, the pieces held together in her hands like something fragile, breathed to life in a child's nightly whispers.

She smiled at the ceiling. Big-smile. Optimistic. "Chorus is a mess," she said, "and it's _our_ mess."

That was all that mattered. The rest would surely follow.


End file.
